the fifteenth century and part of the sixteenth, this alliance was strictly preserved, and the political history of Scotland is the history of a struggle by the kings and clergy against the enormous authority of the nobles. The contest, after lasting about one hundred and sixty years, was brought to a close in 1560, by the triumph of the aristocracy and the overthrow of the Church. With such force, however, had the circumstance just narrated engrained superstition into the Scotch character, that the spiritual classes quickly rallied, and, under their new name of Protestants they became as formidable as under their old name of Catholics. . . . The great Protestant movement which, in other countries, was democratic, was, in Scotland, aristocratic. We shall also see, that, in Scotland, the Reformation, not being the work of the people, has never produced the effects which might have been expected from it, and which it did produce in England. It is, indeed, but too evident that, while in England Protestantism has diminished superstition, has weakened the clergy, has increased toleration, and, in a word, has secured the triumph of secular interests over ecclesiastical ones, its result in Scotland has been entirely different; and that in that country the Church, changing its form without altering its spirit, not only cherished its ancient pretensions but unhappily retained its ancient power; and that, although that power is now dwindling away, the Scotch preachers still exhibit, whenever they dare, an insolent and domineering spirit, which shows how much real weakness there yet lurks in the nation, where such extravagant claims are not immediately silenced by the voice of loud and general ridicule.

The inadequacy and perniciousness of Mr. Buckle's conception of the real bearing of religion upon the national life and character of the Scottish people cannot perhaps be better shown than by such a disingenuous statement as this. In it he deliberately ignored the facts, and falsified and reversed the verdict of modern history. Messrs. Freeman and Gardiner, in their sketch of English history contained in a recent edition of the standard reference manual of Great Britain," only voice the opinion of all honest students when they say:

The English Reformation then, including in that name the merely ecclesiastical changes of Henry as well as the more strictly religious changes of the next reign, was not in its beginning either a popular or a theological movement. In this it differs from the Reformation in many continental countries, and especially from the Reformation in the northern part of Britain. The Scottish Reformation began much later; but, when it began, its course was far swifter and fiercer. That is to say, it was essentially popular and essentially theological. The result was, that, of all the nations which threw off the dominion of the Roman See, England, on the whole, made the least change, while Scotland undoubtedly made the most. (On the whole, because, in some points of sacramental doctrine and ritual, the Lutheran churches, especially in Sweden, have made less change than the Church of England has. But nowhere did the general ecclesiastical system go on with so little change as it did in England.) In England change began from above. . . The small party of theological reform undoubtedly welcomed the changes of Henry, as being likely in the end to advance their own cause; but the mass of the nation was undoubtedly favorable to Henry's system of Popery without the Pope.

On the same subject, Green says:

Knox had been one of the followers of Wishart; he had acted as pastor to the Protestants who after Beaton's murder held the Castle of St. Andrews, and had been captured with them by a French force in the summer of 1547. The Frenchmen sent the heretics to the galleys; and it was as a galley slave in one of their vessels that Knox next saw his native shores. Released at the opening of 1549, Knox found shelter in England, where he became one of the most stirring among the preachers of the day, and was offered a bishopric by Northumberland. Mary's accession drove him again to France. But the new policy of the Regent now opened Scotland to the English refugees, and it was as one of these that Knox returned in 1555 to his own country. Although he soon withdrew to take charge of the English congregations at Frankfort and Geneva, his energy had already given a decisive impulse to the new movement. In a gathering at the house of Lord Erskine he persuaded the assembly to "refuse all society with idolatry, and bind themselves to the uttermost of their power to maintain the true preaching of the Evangile, as God should offer to their preachers an opportunity." The confederacy woke anew the jealousy of the government, and persecution revived. But some of the greatest nobles now joined the reforming cause. The Earl of Morton, the head of the house of Douglas, the Earl of Argyle, the greatest chieftain of the west, and above all a bastard son of the late King, Lord James Stuart, who bore as yet the title of Prior of St. Andrews, but who was to be better known afterwards as the Earl of Murray, placed themselves at the head of the movement. The remonstrances of Knox from his exile at Geneva stirred them to interfere in behalf of the persecuted Protestants; and at the close of 1557 these nobles united with the rest of the Protestant leaders in an engagement which became memorable as the first among those Covenants which were to give shape and color to Scotch religion.

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We," ran this solemn bond, " perceiving how Satan in his members, the Antichrists of our time, cruelly doth rage, seeking to overthrow and to destroy the Evangel of Christ, and His Congregation, ought according to our bounden duty to strive in our Master's cause even unto the death, being certain of our victory in Him. The which our duty being well considered, we do promise before the Majesty of God and his Congregation that we, by His grace, shall with all diligence continually apply our whole power, substance, and our very lives to maintain, set forward, and establish the most blessed Word of God and His Congregation, and shall labor at our possibility to have faithful ministers, purely and truly to minister Christ's Evangel and Sacraments to his people. We shall maintain them, nourish them, and defend them, the whole Congregation of Christ and every member thereof, at our whole power and wearing of our lives, against Satan and all wicked power that does intend tyranny or trouble against the foresaid Congregation. Unto the which Holy Word and Congregation we do join us, and also do forsake and renounce the congregation of Satan with all the superstitious abomination and idolatry thereof and moreover shall declare ourselves manifestly enemies thereto by this our faithful promise before God, testified to His Congregation by our subscription at these presents."

The Covenant of the Scotch nobles marked a new epoch in the strife of religions. Till now the reformers had opposed the doctrine of nationality to the doctrine of Catholicism. In the teeth of the pretensions which the Church advanced to a uniformity of religion in every land, whatever might be its differences of race or government, the first Protestants had advanced

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the principle that each prince or people had alone the right to determine its form of faith and worship. "Cujus regio" ran the famous phrase which embodied their theory, "ejus religio." It was the acknowledgment of this principle that the Lutheran princes obtained at the Diet of Spires; it was on this principle that Henry based his Act of Supremacy. Its strength lay in the correspondence of such a doctrine with the political circumstances of the time. It was the growing feeling of nationality which combined with the growing development of monarchical power to establish the theory that the political and religious life of each nation should be one, and that the religion of the people should follow the faith of the prince. Had Protestantism, as seemed at one time possible, secured the adhesion of all the European princes, such a theory might well have led everywhere as it led in England to the establishment of the worst of tyrannies, a tyranny that claims to lord alike over both body and soul. The world was saved from this danger by the tenacity with which the old religion still held its power. In half the countries of Europe the disciples of the new opinions had soon to choose between submission to their conscience and submission to their prince; and a movement which began in contending for the religious supremacy of kings ended in those wars of religion which arrayed nation after nation against their sovereigns. In this religious revolution Scotland led the way. Her Protestantism was the first to draw the sword against earthly rulers. The solemn "Covenant" which bound together her "Congregation" in the face of the regency, which pledged its members to withdraw from all submission to the religion of the State and to maintain in the face of the State their liberty of conscience, opened that vast series of struggles which ended in Germany with the Peace of Westphalia and in England with the Toleration Act of William the Third,

The "Covenant" of the lords sounded a bold defiance to the Catholic reaction across the border. While Mary replaced the Prayer-book by the Mass, the Scotch lords resolved that wherever their power extended the Common Prayer should be read in all churches. While hundreds were going to the stake in England, the Scotch nobles boldly met the burning of their preachers by a threat of war. "They trouble our preachers," ran their bold remonstrance against the bishops in the Queen-mother's presence; they would murder them and us! shall we suffer this any longer? No, madam, it shall not be!" and therewith every man put on his steel bonnet.

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The testimony of Froude is likewise equally direct and positive': But in England the Reformation was more than half political. The hatred of priests and popes was more a predominant principle than specialty of doctrine. What kings and Parliament had done in England, in Scotland had to be done by the people, and was accompanied therefore with the passionate features of revolt against authority. John Knox became thus the representative of all that was best in Scotland. He was no narrow fanatic, who, in a world in which God's grace was equally visible in a thousand creeds, could see truth and goodness nowhere but in his own formula. He was a large, noble, generous man, with a shrewd perception of actual fact, who found himself face to face with a system of hideous iniquity.

Here, then, we have the direct refutation of Buckle's statements as to the origin of the Scottish Reformation, by four leading authorities on British history, and their opinions are merely confirmatory of the judgment of all observing and unprejudiced men.

Much in the same line with Mr. Buckle's theory of the origin and accomplishment of the Reformation in Scotland is the oft-repeated assertion that the Scottish Church was as relentless and unceasing a persecutor of dissenters as were those of the Papacy or Episcopacy. This assertion, likewise, is not sustained by the facts. Bigoted and intolerant as the Scottish Church became after it was made a part of the machinery of State, its methods were mild and innocuous compared with those of its rivals. The one solitary case where death was inflicted by the authorities for heresy, at the instigation or with the approval of the Kirk, was that of Thomas Aikenhead, who was hanged in 1697 on the charge of atheism and blasphemy against God. While this was a wholly unjustifiable and villainous act of cruelty, it can hardly be classed with those persecutions from which the Presbyterians had suffered. It would seem to belong rather to that class of religious perversities of which the most familiar example was the burning of witches. In this latter diabolism Scotland engaged with perhaps greater zest than either England or Massachusetts. The distinction between the crime of the hanging of Thomas Aikenhead and that of the burning of George Wishart, by the Catholics, or the drowning of Margaret Wilson, by the Episcopalians, therefore, is probably to be found by a contrast of motive rather than of degree; at most it is the difference between fanaticism and tyranny. In the latter cases, the sufferers had denied the authority of the bishops. These prelates aimed at preferment by mixing politics with religion, and could not be wholly sincere or disinterested. George Wishart and Margaret Wilson were slain by them because the bishops could brook no limitations upon their own power. In the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the authority of God had been questioned, and the fanatical zealotry of the ministers permitted the application of John Cotton's law, without the apparent intervention of any personal motives. If such a distinction should at first appear too finely drawn, an examination of the workings of the two principles thus suggested will show that their results are, as a rule, widely different. Indeed, in some aspects, their dissimilarity is almost of equal extent and correspondence with that existing between the two churches of North and South Britain; and the divergence of their ends but little short of that which marks the two opposite principles of democracy and despotism. In New England, where the Calvinistic theory of the supremacy of God and the Bible over man's conscience was at first as fully carried out as in Scotland, a system of democracy was inaugurated which, until its progress became retarded by the union of Church and State, reached a higher degree of perfection than had been the case in any other English community. This system, but for the entrance and long-continued presence of the fatally defective policy of ecclesiastical usurpation in secular affairs, might have developed into an ideal form of government. In Old England, on the contrary, where the authority of the bishops over man's conscience was ever maintained and the theory fully developed by Laud and Sharp and the Stuarts, a highly despotic form of government resulted, from

which mankind had occasionally to find relief by "blood-letting," as in the revolutions of 1638 and 1688. The only similarity apparent in the ultimate workings of these two principles, therefore, would seem to be that identical results have sometimes been reached by the action of one and reaction from the other.

No theological system has yet been devised that is able to sustain this. dual relation-secular and spiritual-without deteriorating; and the history of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland after 1690, when it became the established Church of the State, marks a rapid change in spirit and a steady decadence in spiritual power and influence, only paralleled, perhaps, by that of the kindred Church of New England after 1640.

Charles II., at the time of his father's death, was a friendless fugitive. The Scotch offered to receive him as their king, on condition that he should pledge himself by oath to regard and preserve their Presbyterian form of Church government. To this he assented. When he arrived in the kingdom he subscribed the covenant; and again at his coronation, under circumstances of much more than usual solemnity, he swore to preserve it inviolate. The Scotch accordingly, armed in his defence; but, divided among themselves, and led by a general very unfit to cope with Cromwell, they were soon defeated, and Charles was again driven to the Continent. When he returned in 1660, he voluntarily renewed his promise to the Scotch, by whom his restoration had been greatly promoted, not to interfere with the liberty of their Church. No sooner, however, was he firmly seated on his throne than all these oaths and promises were forgotten. Presbyterianism was at once abolished, and Episcopacy established; not such as it was under James I. when bishops were little more than standing moderators of the Presbyteries, but invested, by the arbitrary mandate of the King, with the fulness of prelatical power. An act was passed making it penal even to speak publicly or privately against the King's supremacy, or the government of the Church by archbishops and bishops. A court of high commission, of which all the prelates were members, was erected and armed with inquisitorial powers. Multitudes of learned and pious ministers were ejected from their parishes, and ignorant and ungodly men, for the most part, introduced in their stead. Yet the people were forced, under severe penalties, to attend the ministrations of these unworthy men. All ejected ministers were prohibited preaching or praying except in their own families; and preaching or praying in the fields was made punishable with death. Any one, though the nearest relative, who should shelter, aid, or in any way minister to the wants of those denounced, was held liable to the same penalty as the person assisted. All landholders were required to give bond that their families and dependants should abstain from attending any conventicle. To enforce these wicked laws torture was freely used to extort evidence or confession; families were reduced to ruin by exorbitant fines; the prisons were filled with victims of oppression; multitudes were banished and sold as slaves; women and even children were